Dark Specter

by Michael Dibdin

  Kristine Kjarstad folded the paper up and stuffed it back into her beach bag. It was time to forget all about stuff like this and just veg out. She should make it a rule not to read the paper or watch the news, maybe not even answer the phone once they got home. The good weather was supposed to hold up through the next week. She would just lounge around the yard, maybe do a little gardening, bask in the sun and try to forget all about the violence that her work brought her into daily contact with. She needed to put things in perspective, to get centered again. And when her vacation time was up, she would go back healed and strong, ready to tackle the cases that came her way one by one, not obsessing about any of them, no longer feeling that it was her business to solve the problems of the world singlehanded.

  She checked her watch and called Thomas, who turned, eyeing her warily.

  “V?r sa god!” she called, using her mother’s Norwegian expression for calling people to the table.

  “Whaaaat?”

  “It’s time for lunch, darling.”

  “Aw, Mom!”

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “But we’re just killing these guys!”

  “All right, five minutes.”

  Shrieking their delight, Thomas and his new friend got to work with the seaweed whips again. Their delirium reminded Kristine of her confrontation with Eric when she picked up Thomas on her return from Atlanta. Her ex-husband had objected to two aspects of his son’s life. The first was an “apparently uncontrolled amount of time spent playing video games,” in excess of the norms laid down in a parents’ guide to the subject he had bought and insisted on her reading too. The second concerned Thomas’s current “obsession” with toy guns.

  Eric had brought up all the usual arguments on this subject, from the need to teach children not to see violence as the solution to their problems, to the undesirability of reinforcing gender stereotypes. In theory, Kristine agreed with all this. The trouble was that her mother had bought the gun in question for Thomas’s birthday after taking him to Toys ‘R’ Us and hashing out at some length exactly what he wanted. It was an air-driven model which fired a brightly colored foam dart, and he and Brent had had endless fun chasing each other around the backyard with it.

  It was all very well for Eric to remind her that the Parenting Plan in their divorce decree included a stipulation that toys would be chosen by both parents in consultation. He didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day business of looking after Thomas, and for that matter didn’t want to. What he wanted, and what he thought he’d found, was a way to extend his control over areas of Kristine’s life which he was no longer able to influence directly but could continue to manipulate through their son.

  She got to her feet, shook the sand out of her towel and put it in her bag.

  “Thomas!”

  Seeing her poised for departure, he contorted his face into a pathetic mask. Kristine almost gave in, then decided that it was time for her to demonstrate some control too. Taking her son by the hand, she led him over to the red Jeep. The other child’s parents had come back from their run and were now relaxing over a power snack of carrot juice and tofu. For a moment Kristine found herself sympathizing with the author of that yuppie-bashing reader board in Hoquiam, but she would gladly have kissed up to the biggest nerd in the world if Thomas got on with his kids.

  In fact the couple turned out to be perfectly pleasant, for Californians. Kristine quickly firmed up an arrangement which would leave her two hours of blissful solitude that afternoon. As she led Thomas up the flights of wooden steps from the beach to the lodge on the cliffs behind, she felt her familiar old Pollyanna self reemerging. It had been a good idea to leave Seattle, but she was always glad to get back. She would just laze around the house and let the rest of the world look after itself. Maybe Eric’s lingering influence had been partly responsible for her crisis. She should take a tip from Paul Merlowitz, and stop worrying about things she couldn’t control.

  About the time that Kristine Kjarstad and her son left the beach to have lunch, a man walked into the office of a motel on Aurora Avenue North in Seattle. This was very different from the one at Ocean Shores. Aurora had once been a bustling thoroughfare, part of Highway 99 linking British Columbia and Mexico. Now all the through traffic used the interstate, and Aurora was a run-down strip of discarded dreams and broken promises. The motels which had survived were mostly on the brink of Chapter Eleven, while some of the sleazier ones functioned as business locations for the prostitutes who worked the avenue.

  The one the man had chosen was on a long narrow lot between a gun shop and an auto-wrecking yard. A massive neon display on a stand sunk in a brick planter read Tuk-Inn Motor Lodge. The office was a fake log cabin with access lanes on either side leading to the rooms. It smelled of mold and cheap air freshener. There were dirty lace curtains over the windows, sad plants in pots, wallpaper with a photograph of mountain scenery repeated over and over, and a plastic sign in mock embroidery stitch that said IF YOU WANT A PLACE IN THE SUN, YOU HAVE TO PUT UP WITH A FEW BLISTERS.

  As the man approached the desk, an electronic bleep sounded in the back room. He dropped the black tubular bag he had carried six blocks from the stop where the Greyhound bus had set him down. A woman in Lurex hot pants and a tight-fitting sweater drifted in through the open doorway. Her nails were elaborately painted, her feet bare.

  “How are you today?” she said.

  “You got a room?” the man asked. “Yeah, I guess you got a room.”

  The woman made a show of consulting a large ring binder with handwritten entries.

  “How long you staying?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Maybe a few days.”

  “Forty bucks gets you a suite with a kitchenette.”

  “Whatever.”

  He handed over two crisp twenty-dollar bills. The woman examined them carefully, then glanced at the man and flashed a smile, as though apologizing for her caution.

  “First time out for these babies, looks like.”

  She caught the look in the man’s eyes and her smile vanished.

  “Third on the left-hand side,” she said in a hard voice, plucking a key from one of the hooks on the wall. “Check-out is at ten. You want to keep the room, it’s another forty.”

  The man picked up his bag and walked down the driveway to the sunken parking lot. The cabins were built of brick patched with sheets of metal. The matt beige paint was flaking off like diseased skin to reveal a drab green. He unlocked the door corresponding to his key number and went in. There was a bed, a table, a sofa, a television, a toilet and shower. The one small window had the same lace curtains as the reception area. It did not open. The air was stuffy, with a sickly scent of mildew. The man set down his heavy bag, locked the door and lay on the bed, staring up at the scabrous rows of ceiling tiles.

  How long would he be staying? As long as it took. He was in no hurry. From now on, everything must be perfect. One call, to establish the address, then the visit. He had no idea where it would be. He didn’t even know which state he’d have to go to. It would most likely be someplace back East, but it could be anywhere, even right here in this town. There was simply no way of knowing.

  In the old days, every detail had been worked out weeks and even months in advance. The system had seemed so flawless. The prophet Los selected those worthy of initiation. He gave them a life and demanded a life in return. That was only just. After that, everything was controlled by the rigorous lottery of chance. The target city was located in the state where the novice had been born. That was where he had entered the false life, the state of Generation, and that was where he must return to perform the ritual which freed him from his native state. Mark had been born in Texas, so his initiation had taken place in Houston. Lenny was from a small town in Missouri, so he’d gone to St. Louis to become his eternal self, Palambron. Russell was from somewhere around here, so he’d come to the Seattle area to celebrate his passage into the state of Eden.

>   And now they were all dead. It was a bitter blow, when so much loving care and attention had gone into their rebirthing. First the novice’s personal number was calculated. You took an ordinary pocket calculator, the kind you can buy at any drugstore, powered by a solar cell-by Sol, which is another name for Los. You keyed in the month, day and year of the subject’s birthday, then pressed the square root key to obtain the magic string of numbers which expressed the root of his existence, the secret DNA code of his eternal self.

  It was so beautifully simple! Say the person was born on September 11, 1958. You tapped in 0, 9, 1, 1, 5, 8, then hit?. That gave you the sequence 30192383. The novice and the initiate who would accompany him then took the boat across to Friday Harbor, where there was a public library. They went to the reference section and consulted the White Pages phone book for the city in question. They looked up the page corresponding to the first three digits of the personal number and took a photocopy of it which they brought back to the island.

  Now began the arduous task of determining the exact address. Each page of the phone book contained approximately 440 entries, arranged in four columns. The calculation involved running through all the permutations of the remaining digits of the novice’s personal number. In the case of the man born on September 11, 1958, this meant finding the ninth entry from the beginning, then the 92nd from that, then the 923rd, the 9,238th, the 92,383rd, the 2,383rd, the 383rd and the 83rd. The third entry after that one was the target address.

  It wasn’t necessary to count the entries by hand, of course, although some people preferred to do so. One of the men with a mathematical flair had come up with a formula for calculating the correct result once the number of entries in each column had been counted, and this was always used as a check. So there was never the slightest question in the novice’s mind that the house to which he would go had been selected in accordance with the divine will, expressed through the agency men call chance. As a result, he was freed of all doubt and empowered to perform the ritual, knowing that the victims were mere specters created by a loving God to permit the illusion of evil in a world where only good existed.

  The man rolled up off the bed, covering his face with his hands and gasping as though struggling for breath. When he finally removed his hands, both they and his face were wet with tears. It was such a joyful, liberating truth, and they had labored so long and hard to demonstrate themselves worthy of possessing it! Yet it had come to nothing. They were all dead, and that could mean only one thing: they had never been alive in the first place.

  Chance might appear to be a mere lottery, but he knew that it possessed a rigorous logic, and one that must be obeyed. Whatever it cost him, he had to submit to God’s will. If his friends and allies were dead, it was because they had been specters from the beginning, every one. It wasn’t just a question of this or that person not working out, a Dale Watson here, a Russell Crosby there. The wholesale nature of the holocaust which had occurred demonstrated that once and for all.

  He alone had survived. That proved his reality, but also his solitude. From now on, he would have to shoulder the terrible burden of the Secret all by himself. The mystics of the Cabala had taught that as long as there was one enlightened man left alive, God would spare the world for his sake. It was an awesome responsibility to hold the destiny of all Creation in your hands, but he had no choice.

  There would be no more mistakes, no more false disciples. From now on, he would trust nobody but himself. He would live quietly and alone, invisible to every eye but God’s. But first he had a debt to pay, a sacrificial offering to mark his acceptance of the great task which had been entrusted to him. He had pledged his faith in blood, and now that pledge must be renewed. Only thus could he be cleansed, and all the errors and confusion of the past erased.

  He opened the black bag and lifted out the handcuffs and the roll of tape he’d bought in Everett, then the Cobray automatic pistol. He wouldn’t use that, though. Sometime in the next few days he’d swing by the gun shop next door and pick up a.22 revolver and some Stinger ammunition. A couple of boxes should be enough. Whatever else might have gone wrong, there was nothing wrong with the method itself. It was tried and tested, and he would stick to it.

  He weighed the Cobray in his hand, thinking over his next move. It would be best to let things settle down for a couple of days before doing anything. This was a perfect place to hole up. All they wanted was money, and he had plenty of that. It hadn’t always been that way. Back in the early days, each initiation had to be funded by the novice going off and taking some lousy job for a couple of months. But that had all changed with Rick’s arrival. His was the only case where the victims had been selected personally instead of in the regular way. But Los made the rules, and he could break them. As he’d said at the time, the test of faith was even greater when the individuals concerned were your own father and mother.

  There had been a stunned silence when the news was announced. You could see them all wondering if they’d have been able to do it themselves. It had been hard enough for some of them to agree never to see their parents again, never mind having to hold a gun to their heads and expose their sham existence for what it was, a mess of meat and bone and tissue. But Rick had wanted to do it. He hated them both, especially his mother, who had never lifted a finger to stop the abuse he had suffered as a child. He figured his father didn’t know any better, but she should have stepped in and done something. Well, she hadn’t, and now he would.

  Whatever Rick’s feelings were, the financial rewards for the group had been substantial. The sale of the family house, plus the life insurance and various investments, had netted almost a quarter of a million dollars. The other son, Matt, would have got a share of that, but Rick had scores to settle with him too. A telephone call had been enough to send Matt, who had a plumbing business, out in response to a nonexistent emergency around about the time the cops arrived at the parents’ luxurious suburban house, alerted by a neighbor who had seen flames. They found the father and mother dead, their chests blasted away by a shotgun. The weapon was not recovered. The fire had been caused by a pan of oil which the mother had apparently been heating on the stove when she was attacked. There was no sign of forced entry, and neither the sophisticated alarm system nor the family’s German shepherd dog had responded to the intruder.

  Since Rick was supposedly in Mexico-he’d crossed the border a week before, then paid a coyote to smuggle him back with a group of illegal immigrants-it was only a matter of time before the police began to suspect the other brother. No one was surprised when Matt was found in his truck up in the mountains, his head blown away by a blast from the shotgun he was holding, and which had also been used to kill his parents. Rick had set up the meeting, stressing the need for secrecy, on the pretext of working out a fake alibi if Matt was arrested.

  As a result, the estate had come to Rick, and through him to the rest of them. The money had been deposited in a bank in Bellingham and was accessible via the Accel and Interlink systems at any one of millions of cash machines all over the country. He could afford to wait weeks, even months, until it was perfectly clear that the police suspected nothing.

  The thought made him reach into the bag again. He took out a pair of pants and jacket in a dark, heavy material. They needed to be cleaned and pressed, but it might well be a nice touch to wear them when the time came. But first he had to find out where the house was and figure out the bus schedules. It might take days to get there, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t care how long or uncomfortable the journey was, just as long as he arrived safely.

  And he would! He knew it, suddenly, with a surge of confidence and courage that made him want to leap in the air and holler exultantly. He would arrive and the others would depart, revealed for the shams they were. And the survival of the Secret would be ensured forever, sealed in their blood.

  24

  It was a Sunday morning, ten days after I was released. I had gone to run some errands at the local
stores and now I was walking home, relishing the warm sunshine and the cool breeze and the stunning views of snow-capped mountains above the wooded ridges and valleys of the North Seattle skyline.

  We had been in the house a week, and were still settling in. It had been made a condition of my release that I should remain in the state, available to the San Juan County investigators. At the same time, both Andrea and I wanted to get away-and to get David away-from the islands themselves which, beautiful as they were, held such horrific memories for us. When my lawyer mentioned a house in Seattle that was available for a few months at a reasonable rent, we jumped at the idea.

  When I was finally given my conditional freedom, I had no expectations about anything or anyone from my former life. All that had been wiped clean. After being charged with crimes I had experienced only as a victim, nothing seemed impossible, or even unlikely. Normality had become a meaningless concept. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that David had vanished again, and that everyone was conspiring to convince me that he had died back in Minnesota months before. As for Andrea, I no longer had any firm belief that she had ever existed in the first place. She was just one among many phantom figures I seemed to have encountered in the course of my hallucinatory experiences on the island.

  So I was even more amazed than pleased to find her waiting for me when I emerged from my cell. Thanks to a benign sexism on the part of Sheriff Griffiths, Andrea had never been regarded as a suspect, and once he had taken a full statement from her she had been free to go. But she had stayed. That made all the difference. We both had to make plans, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to make them together. After what we had just lived through, any arrangement was bound to seem provisional. Why not take the path of least resistance, rent this house that my lawyer had found and see how things turned out?